Normally, screen savers do not require admin privileges to run, you just run them out of your user directory. But in this case, the screensaver was packaged in a.deb which does require administrator privileges. sudo dpkg -i cute_kittens_screen_saver.deb
[quote]
If i tell you to type "sudo rm -rf/" and enter your password when asked, will we see
article like "OMG! UBUNTU GOT MALWARE" the next day too?
[/quote]
You would be surprised. If Linux were popular, and were used by many people who were novice users, such as is the case with Windows, then yes, they would be doing exactly that. It's a common joke on certain tech forums and image boards to trick users into entering "runas/profile/user:administrator del c:\windows\system32" and many unsuspecting people fall for it.
It doesn't help when you have a clueless ignorant user involved. Teach such a person how to use sudo and inevitably they're going to elevate privileges requested by malware. I mean, by golly, if they want to install that screen saver with cute kittens, then they're going to install it, sudo be damned. Most people aren't as paranoid as you or I may be when it comes to trusting the content and software we download, and they may not be able to draw the association with it possibly having a trojan/virus payload. Afterall, all they see are the cute kittens.
Yes, but clueless users aren't going to be knowledgeable enough to download and install the patch. Hell, they probably won't even notice they're infected until months later.
I agree. The best software in the world can't protect itself from clueless ignorant users who don't know any better. The more clueless, ignorant users using the software, the higher the rate of occurrence of exploitation. If Linux were to become as popular as Windows, I guarantee it would have just as many problems as Windows users currently suffer from.
PC gamers are abandoning XP and Vista and moving towards Windows 7. For the first time ever since Valve began publishing their hardware survey back in 2003, Windows XP usage among Steam users has finally dipped below the 50% mark, and is losing ground relatively fast.
Steam Hardware Survey
Pay as meager as $50 is similar to the allowance given to indentured servants back in old times. He was also forced into labor, he couldn't leave. That $50 had to be spent on the compound at the canteen. It was slavery.
1.7% yields of Fermi GPUs in first batch.
Wooden screws used in the non-working Fermi prototype card which Nvidia claimed was working.
Q2 2010 release date now for consumer Fermi GPUs instead of the promised Q4 2009 release.
20% clock miss on Fermi architecture.
And now they're releasing re-badged crap yet again.
As of Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, the graphics drivers are all user mode. When a graphics driver crashes on those systems, it doesn't bring the whole system down. The graphics driver gets restarted and you continue with your business.
You also forget that many pirated copies of Windows ISO images and repacks come with rootkits out of the box and you're already infected and will be on a botnet, and there's nothing that can be done to remove the rootkit once it's there. Not every pirate is informed enough to check MD5/SHA1 hashes and file sizes of their downloads against known good values. So it doesn't matter if Microsoft extends support to pirates or not.
For a 5200rpm "green" drive, perhaps. But for 7200rpm enterprise-grade storage with RAID support, like Western Digital's RE3 and RE4 line of drives, you're still up at around $200 for a 1TB drive and $375 for a 2TB drive.
I mean, both Intel and OCZ have said that once they get to tri and quad-state MLC flash technology, prices should drop considerably by 2012.
I think Seagate just doesn't want to be relegated as a dying tech company.
What you say makes perfect sense than the slashdot editor/submitter's headline. Essentially they're forcing hardware developers to develop both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for their products if they want to be Windows 7 certified. Now that is fantastic.
Because if they didn't release a 32-bit edition of the OS, it would piss off too many people. You'd have noticeable faction of people up in arms. I'm all for 64-bit computing, I'm not looking back. But there's enough people out there with 1GB of RAM or less that would complain. 64-bit OSes and 64-bit applications have a slightly larger memory footprint because pointers, offsets, and certain kernel object handles are suddenly 64-bits in length instead of 32-bit.
Just because Windows XP can't run Direct3D 10/11 doesn't mean that Direct3D never supported geometry-shaders before OpenGL. Direct3D 10 had geometry shader support back in 2006, and it's what spurred the development of actual hardware that supported that feature set. It's true that nVidia had their GL_EXT_geometry_shader4 extension working back in 2007, but ATI/AMD NEVER supported it. It wasn't until OpenGL 3.2 was announced in August of this year that we actually got standardized support for geometry shaders, but the OpenGL 3.2 drivers from nVidia and ATI are still in beta.
They do support OpenGL, in fact ATI's Direct3D 11 cards will support the latest version, OpenGL 3.2. However, it should be noted that the OpenGL 3.2 feature set is the same as Direct3D 10, which doesn't really bring anything new to the table. Direct3D 11 is where all of the new features are.
He already explained it. It was a headache for everyone involved doing it that way. It's why the OpenGL ARB was disbanded a few years ago and replaced with the Khronos Group which now more or less follows Direct3D features. Pretty soon though we'll see a return to fully programmable graphics hardware post Intel Larrabee, and we'll probably see some software developers moving away from OpenGL and Direct3D and implementing their own low-level rendering stacks. It's hard to say if Microsoft or the Khronos Group will move to standardize such hardware or not.
I haven't received any updates to my ATI X800 recently. Sure, they release a new Catalyst Driver pack every now and then, but it doesn't actually improve performance or fix the same bug I have in trying to Doom 3 full screen in Windows Vista.
It's also why their R400 series hardware documentation wasn't released to the community like they did for the R200/R300 and R500/600, probably because they didn't have it well documented and decided it wasn't worth paying to release specs for it after it's already end-of-lifed.
Yeah, there's a lot of idiots here who still think OpenGL is better than Direct3D. I doubt they'll ever change their opinions despite the fact that some of us are trying to force the facts down their throats.
I'm by no means a Microsoft fanboy, I also use OS X and a couple of Linux distros at home and work, but you just can't argue with the fact that Direct3D 11 is better than anything else out there. Hands down. It's just a better API all around. I'm looking forward to moving towards implementing a Direct3D 11 renderer in our code base in the future. Currently our Direct3D 9 rendering code path is almost half the number of lines of code for our OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 renderer implementations.
Most game developers are skipping Direct3D 10 because it's explicitly tied to Vista and it has poor market share compared to Windows XP/Direct3D 9.0c. The hope is that most current gamers on Windows XP will eventually move to Windows 7, and that Direct3D 11 enjoys the same long life span as Direct3D 9.0, ending up in the console from Microsoft.
Actually, it hasn't been this way since around 2003/2004. Essentially nVidia, ATI/AMD, Intel and a few other lesser known vendors sit down in league with Microsoft and decide what kind of features they will be able to implement in the next graphics hardware cycle. They then come up with the API and get feedback from the hardware vendors and work towards a final workable API. This is what we saw with Direct3D 9.0c, Direct3D 10, and Direct3D 11.
OpenGL and the ARB has lagged way behind Microsoft and its partners, which is why the ARB was eventually disbanded and replaced by the Khronos Group. The Khronos Group kind of messed up OpenGL 3.0, they didn't implement half of the things they said they were going to do. As such, OpenGL 3.0 lagged quite a ways behind Direct3D 10. Fortunately, they've caught up, and OpenGL 3.2 is on par with Direct3D 10, but still a big step behind the new stuff in Direct3D 11.
As such, Microsoft and it's partners are leading the pack here, and Khronos (and because most of Microsoft's Direct3D partners are also Khronos group members) is no playing the role of follower. You can be guaranteed that the next major revision to OpenGL to match Direct3D 11 almost exactly in features, as nVidia, ATI/AMD, et. al. don't want to deviate radically in their underlying hardware.
I agree with what you say. I'd just like to add that Khronos has finally gotten the hint and is moving quickly in catching up to Direct3D. They might always be behind, but at least they won't be that far behind. The recently released OpenGL 3.2 implements all of the Direct3D 10 features, at least as far as I know. We can probably expect another OpenGL revision Q1 2010 with some Direct3D 11 features, but probably not all of them. I really don't know what Khronos is going to do when it comes to trying to implement shader linking in GLSL, as SM 5.0 is quite revolutionary in comparison to SM 4.0.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally, screen savers do not require admin privileges to run, you just run them out of your user directory. But in this case, the screensaver was packaged in a .deb which does require administrator privileges. sudo dpkg -i cute_kittens_screen_saver.deb
[quote] If i tell you to type "sudo rm -rf /" and enter your password when asked, will we see
article like "OMG! UBUNTU GOT MALWARE" the next day too?
[/quote]
You would be surprised. If Linux were popular, and were used by many people who were novice users, such as is the case with Windows, then yes, they would be doing exactly that. It's a common joke on certain tech forums and image boards to trick users into entering "runas /profile /user:administrator del c:\windows\system32" and many unsuspecting people fall for it.
It doesn't help when you have a clueless ignorant user involved. Teach such a person how to use sudo and inevitably they're going to elevate privileges requested by malware. I mean, by golly, if they want to install that screen saver with cute kittens, then they're going to install it, sudo be damned. Most people aren't as paranoid as you or I may be when it comes to trusting the content and software we download, and they may not be able to draw the association with it possibly having a trojan/virus payload. Afterall, all they see are the cute kittens.
Yes, but clueless users aren't going to be knowledgeable enough to download and install the patch. Hell, they probably won't even notice they're infected until months later.
I agree. The best software in the world can't protect itself from clueless ignorant users who don't know any better. The more clueless, ignorant users using the software, the higher the rate of occurrence of exploitation. If Linux were to become as popular as Windows, I guarantee it would have just as many problems as Windows users currently suffer from.
PC gamers are abandoning XP and Vista and moving towards Windows 7. For the first time ever since Valve began publishing their hardware survey back in 2003, Windows XP usage among Steam users has finally dipped below the 50% mark, and is losing ground relatively fast. Steam Hardware Survey
Pay as meager as $50 is similar to the allowance given to indentured servants back in old times. He was also forced into labor, he couldn't leave. That $50 had to be spent on the compound at the canteen. It was slavery.
1.7% yields of Fermi GPUs in first batch.
Wooden screws used in the non-working Fermi prototype card which Nvidia claimed was working.
Q2 2010 release date now for consumer Fermi GPUs instead of the promised Q4 2009 release.
20% clock miss on Fermi architecture.
And now they're releasing re-badged crap yet again.
When will it end?
As of Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, the graphics drivers are all user mode. When a graphics driver crashes on those systems, it doesn't bring the whole system down. The graphics driver gets restarted and you continue with your business.
You also forget that many pirated copies of Windows ISO images and repacks come with rootkits out of the box and you're already infected and will be on a botnet, and there's nothing that can be done to remove the rootkit once it's there. Not every pirate is informed enough to check MD5/SHA1 hashes and file sizes of their downloads against known good values. So it doesn't matter if Microsoft extends support to pirates or not.
For a 5200rpm "green" drive, perhaps. But for 7200rpm enterprise-grade storage with RAID support, like Western Digital's RE3 and RE4 line of drives, you're still up at around $200 for a 1TB drive and $375 for a 2TB drive.
I mean, both Intel and OCZ have said that once they get to tri and quad-state MLC flash technology, prices should drop considerably by 2012. I think Seagate just doesn't want to be relegated as a dying tech company.
What you say makes perfect sense than the slashdot editor/submitter's headline. Essentially they're forcing hardware developers to develop both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for their products if they want to be Windows 7 certified. Now that is fantastic.
Because if they didn't release a 32-bit edition of the OS, it would piss off too many people. You'd have noticeable faction of people up in arms. I'm all for 64-bit computing, I'm not looking back. But there's enough people out there with 1GB of RAM or less that would complain. 64-bit OSes and 64-bit applications have a slightly larger memory footprint because pointers, offsets, and certain kernel object handles are suddenly 64-bits in length instead of 32-bit.
LCDs won't give you cataracts like CRTs can.
Just because Windows XP can't run Direct3D 10/11 doesn't mean that Direct3D never supported geometry-shaders before OpenGL. Direct3D 10 had geometry shader support back in 2006, and it's what spurred the development of actual hardware that supported that feature set. It's true that nVidia had their GL_EXT_geometry_shader4 extension working back in 2007, but ATI/AMD NEVER supported it. It wasn't until OpenGL 3.2 was announced in August of this year that we actually got standardized support for geometry shaders, but the OpenGL 3.2 drivers from nVidia and ATI are still in beta.
They do support OpenGL, in fact ATI's Direct3D 11 cards will support the latest version, OpenGL 3.2. However, it should be noted that the OpenGL 3.2 feature set is the same as Direct3D 10, which doesn't really bring anything new to the table. Direct3D 11 is where all of the new features are.
He already explained it. It was a headache for everyone involved doing it that way. It's why the OpenGL ARB was disbanded a few years ago and replaced with the Khronos Group which now more or less follows Direct3D features. Pretty soon though we'll see a return to fully programmable graphics hardware post Intel Larrabee, and we'll probably see some software developers moving away from OpenGL and Direct3D and implementing their own low-level rendering stacks. It's hard to say if Microsoft or the Khronos Group will move to standardize such hardware or not.
I haven't received any updates to my ATI X800 recently. Sure, they release a new Catalyst Driver pack every now and then, but it doesn't actually improve performance or fix the same bug I have in trying to Doom 3 full screen in Windows Vista. It's also why their R400 series hardware documentation wasn't released to the community like they did for the R200/R300 and R500/600, probably because they didn't have it well documented and decided it wasn't worth paying to release specs for it after it's already end-of-lifed.
Yeah, there's a lot of idiots here who still think OpenGL is better than Direct3D. I doubt they'll ever change their opinions despite the fact that some of us are trying to force the facts down their throats. I'm by no means a Microsoft fanboy, I also use OS X and a couple of Linux distros at home and work, but you just can't argue with the fact that Direct3D 11 is better than anything else out there. Hands down. It's just a better API all around. I'm looking forward to moving towards implementing a Direct3D 11 renderer in our code base in the future. Currently our Direct3D 9 rendering code path is almost half the number of lines of code for our OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 renderer implementations.
To clarify, I meant the next console from Microsoft.
Most game developers are skipping Direct3D 10 because it's explicitly tied to Vista and it has poor market share compared to Windows XP/Direct3D 9.0c. The hope is that most current gamers on Windows XP will eventually move to Windows 7, and that Direct3D 11 enjoys the same long life span as Direct3D 9.0, ending up in the console from Microsoft.
Actually, it hasn't been this way since around 2003/2004. Essentially nVidia, ATI/AMD, Intel and a few other lesser known vendors sit down in league with Microsoft and decide what kind of features they will be able to implement in the next graphics hardware cycle. They then come up with the API and get feedback from the hardware vendors and work towards a final workable API. This is what we saw with Direct3D 9.0c, Direct3D 10, and Direct3D 11. OpenGL and the ARB has lagged way behind Microsoft and its partners, which is why the ARB was eventually disbanded and replaced by the Khronos Group. The Khronos Group kind of messed up OpenGL 3.0, they didn't implement half of the things they said they were going to do. As such, OpenGL 3.0 lagged quite a ways behind Direct3D 10. Fortunately, they've caught up, and OpenGL 3.2 is on par with Direct3D 10, but still a big step behind the new stuff in Direct3D 11. As such, Microsoft and it's partners are leading the pack here, and Khronos (and because most of Microsoft's Direct3D partners are also Khronos group members) is no playing the role of follower. You can be guaranteed that the next major revision to OpenGL to match Direct3D 11 almost exactly in features, as nVidia, ATI/AMD, et. al. don't want to deviate radically in their underlying hardware.
Or you know, the hardware could just come with documentation so everyone could implement their favorite API on top of it.
We will be seeing more of this once Intel's Larrabee platform gets released early next year.
I agree with what you say. I'd just like to add that Khronos has finally gotten the hint and is moving quickly in catching up to Direct3D. They might always be behind, but at least they won't be that far behind. The recently released OpenGL 3.2 implements all of the Direct3D 10 features, at least as far as I know. We can probably expect another OpenGL revision Q1 2010 with some Direct3D 11 features, but probably not all of them. I really don't know what Khronos is going to do when it comes to trying to implement shader linking in GLSL, as SM 5.0 is quite revolutionary in comparison to SM 4.0.